Ha so there has been quite a gap in posts this term :p There has just been so much going on this term with Gnomon work, polishing old projects, trying to wrangle my game creation 4 project into a working game XD and balancing all that with my work at Dreamscape. Still we all survived and created some really beautiful work! I can't wait to see the Gnomon graduate reel in January!
Check out my most up to date reel and projects on my
Artstation and
Vimeo
We had a few industry professionals from Activision visit around week 4
and even though the feedback I got was very positive I decided to shelf
my current project and go back to polish my older stuff a little more.
The main feedback I had was that my reel showed more than enough content
but it really could benefit from one last lighting and polish pass.
Also my radio prop from Nick's class was criticised as a little too low
poly for a hero prop so I went back and re modeled and textured it. I was actually pretty happy to be told to spend more polygons on that prop since I really enjoyed the project and being able to take it to a higher resolution finish was a lot of fun.
First up is Bitteryarrow castle interior. This project has been off and on so many times I am starting to get really blind to how it changes and I have to go pull up old versions. I made a few lighting changes this time to balance out the moonlight and candle light since they felt like they were really competing in the mid ground. I also updated the floor disc since it was becoming lost in the shadows. I introduced some metal coating and increased the relief depth to give it more impact. This was more challenging than I fist thought since the Ztool has completley corrupted now so I only had my baked textures to work from. Still I managed to make it work in Painter and I am pretty happy with the result. I also tweaked the candle and glass materials to better integrate them into the scene. The glass was completely redone since the refraction effect was giving me some really weird results. In the end I simply replaced the old glass with a few layers of additive grunge instead. The effect works to give the glass an old and dusty feel which is what I was trying to do originally. The added benefit is that there is no distracting refraction issues as the camera passes through the scene.
Next up I took another pass at relighting my Bitteryarrow exterior shots. Mostly I was just trying to introduce more light into the shots to show all the work that went into them. I do still like the mood of the older shots but they looked radically different on each monitor that I tested them on. I remember going to an interview and seeing my main exterior shot on an apple laptop and it was almost completely black :p The new lighting is a lot more reliable now thankfully! I also added some splash effects to my boat close up. This really punched up that shot but it was a nightmare trying to render out the sequence. Each time I tried to get unreal to bake out the animation using sequencer the splash effects would work for around 30 frames then they would freeze and loose their attachment to the boat! None of the teachers I took this problem too could figure out what the issues was and we chalked it up to just how buggy the unreal sequencer is when running effects work. In the end I had to use a screen capture software which was OK just much harder to color correct.
My Podracer scene also got a lighting and FX update. It was really fun to go back to this scene after 2 terms of FX training and update the sparks, and plasma beam. I didn't go too indepth with it since I was short on time but I feel that its a large improvement from the original sprite sheet I had for Texturing and Shading for games which feels like a very long time ago. Also thankfully sequencer worked just fine for these effects!
Here is my updated radio. Since I changed the original topology so much and optimized the UV's I did have to completely re texture the prop which was a good move anyway since I feel like I got a lot more out of each of the maps this time. I think this piece feels a little more mature than my last attempt and holds up to closer inspection a lot better too.
Lastly here is my Game Creation 4 final
Aphelion I was in a little bit of a crisis in week 8 when most of the systems were in place but nothing was working quite right. I was having AI issues, scoring issues etc but a little bit of help and a lot of mapping out of systems later and I wound up with a working game yay!!! The art is all block in, the game is very simple and at the moment you can pretty much spam all your abilities and shooting so that needs a lot of refining but enough of the architecture exists now that I think with a bit of time me and my team can have a lot of fun with this!
So I guess that will be it for a little while. I will keep posting on this blog with any work I can share I am also going to take my free Gnomon class next term 'Texturing and Shading 4.' I hope this class gives me a bit of an insight into how the Modeling and Texturing track do such beautiful work and maybe I can adapt that learning into the games pipeline. I also have a large list of mini learning projects to burn through that I will be posting on here when I can.
Thanks for reading :)
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